Let’s be completely honest about what just happened with Graham Platner. The Democratic establishment didn’t care about his morals. They didn’t care when the world found out about his Nazi chest tattoo or the allegations against him. High-profile progressives stood right next to him and nodded along because he polled well and they thought he could win.
But the absolute second the polling drops, they tossed him away. Winning is their god and defeating the opposition is their only commandment. They don’t look back. They just leave a trail of wreckage and broken bodies behind them.
The Republicans stopped listening to the people. But the Democrats? The Democrats are trying to engineer the people. If you are a tool for that machine, enjoy it while it lasts, because the moment you aren’t useful, you’re headed straight for the garbage.
New York City is baking under a brutal heat wave, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s answer was not more power, it was less use of the power you already pay for.
The self-described socialist mayor took to X and asked New Yorkers to set their thermostats to 78 degrees, shut off lights and electronics, and unplug what they can, so the grid does not buckle under demand.
To be fair, it is a request, not a rule. Nobody gets arrested for running their AC at 68. But listen to how the mayor framed it. City buildings are already locked to 78 degrees. Private partners are being asked to fall in line. Nonessential equipment is being powered down by City Hall itself.
That is the pattern. When socialism does not have the votes or the legal authority to force compliance, it leans on moral pressure instead. New Yorkers are being told that keeping their own homes livable in triple digit heat is somehow selfish, unless they voluntarily suffer a little for the common good.
Conservatives from Ted Cruz to Nikki Haley to Vivek Ramaswamy piled on within hours, and even a City Council Republican, Vickie Paladino, warned this is exactly how it starts. First the suggestion, then the shaming, then the higher prices, then the regulation. Europe already lived this story.
The Founders built a government meant to secure liberty, not manage a thermostat. The Federalist Papers warned again and again about power that grows through small, reasonable sounding steps. A polite request today has a way of becoming policy tomorrow, especially from a mayor who just days earlier called socialism the future of his party.
New Yorkers do not need a mayor micromanaging their comfort. They need a grid that can handle a hot summer without asking citizens to sweat for the cause. – Federalist Papers
I don’t know who Abbie Conant is but she posted this cartoon to praise socialism and own the cons. She seems a bit prickly, ending the post with:
“It appears that Facebook manipulated the distribution of the post to include hundreds of people who are not my friends and who have rather ignorant, rightwing views. At any rate, their comments provide an interesting view of the USA and the bizarre narrowness of its political spectrum.”
Being an ignorant right-winger, I felt her statement was invitation to inject a little non-ignorance to the discussion, so I tagged her.
Here goes.
The cartoon is clever, but it rests on an assumption that falls apart the moment you spend thirty seconds thinking about it.
It invites the viewer to look at Paris—Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe—and conclude that socialism must be responsible because France today has a large socialist influence in its government. That is like pointing at the Golden Gate Bridge and arguing that Medicare built it because both exist at the same time.
Almost everything that makes Paris instantly recognizable predates modern socialism by centuries. Notre-Dame was built by the Catholic Church beginning in the twelfth century. The Louvre began life as a royal fortress under the French monarchy. The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by Napoleon. The grand boulevards of Paris were carved through the city under Napoleon III. Even the Eiffel Tower—the youngest landmark in the cartoon—was built by Gustave Eiffel’s private engineering company for the 1889 World’s Fair, decades before democratic socialism became a meaningful political force in France.
Socialists did not build Paris. They inherited it.
More importantly, they inherited the wealth that made Paris possible. The city’s monuments, museums, churches, bridges, and boulevards were financed by centuries of commerce, manufacturing, private enterprise, skilled craftsmen, merchants, engineers, architects, religious institutions, and, yes, governments taxing an increasingly productive economy. Whether one admires monarchies or not, the wealth that produced these works was created long before the modern welfare state existed.
This illustrates a common rhetorical sleight of hand. Advocates of socialism frequently point to prosperous Western nations with generous welfare systems as evidence that socialism works, while quietly overlooking the fact that those societies became wealthy before they dramatically expanded redistribution. The prosperity came first. The welfare state came later.
That does not prove that every social program is bad. It does expose the dishonesty of claiming credit for a civilization that others built. There is a profound difference between creating wealth and redistributing wealth that has already been created. The meme intentionally blurs that distinction.
If someone wants to argue that modern France is better because of its social policies, make that argument. But don’t pretend socialism built Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower, or the Louvre. History simply will not cooperate.
Paris is not a monument to socialism. It is a monument to nearly a thousand years of religion, private enterprise, engineering, commerce, art, and accumulated civilization. Socialists didn’t build that city any more than Medicare built the Golden Gate Bridge. They simply arrived after it was already standing.
More or less inflammatory, reactionary, hysterical rhetoric of that party. They don’t think things through but react and with emotions. Then when those democrat polices don’t work they prefer to blame other people who had nothing to do with the problems they, the Democrats, created because their, the Democrats, real goal is the usurpation of power
Here is a fun little puzzle for anyone who says the left is all about diversity and lifting up immigrants.
Elon Musk just became the first person in history to reach a net worth of one trillion dollars. He was born in Pretoria, South Africa. He came to America the legal way, earned his citizenship in 2002, and built companies that put rockets in orbit and electric cars in millions of driveways.
By any honest reading of the words, he is an African who became an American. A self-made immigrant success story.
So where are the celebrations from the people who say they love immigrants and worship green energy?
Nowhere to be found.
Here is the part that makes you laugh out loud. Not long ago, that same crowd adored this man. Tesla was the official car of the climate movement. Democrats made up about 40 percent of Tesla buyers. They parked his cars in their driveways like a badge of honor.
Then Musk did the unforgivable. He started thinking for himself. He questioned the spending, the censorship, and the narrative. He stopped voting the way they told him to.
And just like that, the hero became the villain.
The cars they once bragged about got bumper stickers that read, I bought this before Elon went crazy. The man they praised became, in their own words, public enemy number one.
Nothing about Musk changed except his politics. Same immigrant. Same companies. Same electric cars they used to love.
That is the tell. The applause was never about the achievement. It was about obedience.
We have always believed people should be judged by their work and their character, not by whether they fall in line. Musk earned every dollar of his success. The only thing he refused to do was bow.
pastorwardclinton 